


Be it ever so beautiful

by Sororising



Series: Colourblind Steve fics [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Art, Colourblind character, Disability, Fluff and Angst, Historical Accuracy, Howling Commandos - Freeform, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-17 03:18:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8128363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising
Summary: Bucky knows that no-one takes him seriously when he talks about how good Steve's art is, how he could really go places if someone just gave him a chance to. But he also knows, somehow, that Steve's going to prove the rest of the world wrong one day. He has dreams about an exhibition, of queues outside the Met, high class folks waiting in line whispering about this new artist who's been the talk of the city for weeks. This Steven Grant Rogers, who used to be some no-name kid from Brooklyn. Sometimes he tells Steve about his fantasies, but usually he gets nothing more than a laugh and a shove - give over, Buck, I'd count myself lucky to get a job painting street signs, or folks that go to the Met wouldn't wipe their shoes on my doodles, stop dreaming.-The second in a series of unrelated works that include colourblind Steve.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You don't need to read any other works in the series to read this one. Thank you to everyone who left such kind comments on [We colour the world with our hope,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7867951/chapters/17968255) this is for you.
> 
> Title from the following quote:
> 
> "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."
> 
> L. Frank Baum, _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz._  
> 

* * *

Bucky hates that Steve is colourblind in a way he doesn’t know how to explain, even to himself. It’s just so unfair that on top of his asthma and his weak heart and pneumonia every other winter, Steve has this one stupid extra ailment that’s going to make it so much harder for him to be an artist. You can paint without a strong heart or sturdy bones, but painting without colours? If anyone can do it, he guesses that Steve can, but he just wishes life had balanced things out a bit more.

Bucky knows that no-one takes him seriously when he talks about how _good_ Steve's art is, how he could really go places if someone just gave him a chance to. But he also knows, somehow, that Steve's going to prove the rest of the world wrong one day. He has dreams about an exhibition, of queues outside the Met, high class folks waiting in line whispering about this new artist who's been the talk of the city for weeks. About how powerful and beautiful his work is, this Steven Grant Rogers who used to be some no-name kid from Brooklyn. Sometimes he tells Steve about his fantasies, but usually he gets nothing more than a laugh and a shove - _give over, Buck, I'd count myself lucky to get a job painting street signs,_ or _folks that go to the Met wouldn't wipe their shoes on my doodles, stop dreaming._

One time, though, Steve goes quiet. It's as though he's finally realised that Bucky is serious, that he means every word he's saying and he always has done. 

"And where are you, huh?" Steve's voice is serious, and his pencil is still on the page for the first time in an hour.

"What d'you mean, where am I?" Bucky is honestly confused. He'd be by Steve's side, of course, same as always. Only this time they’d have nicer shoes, maybe, and Steve wouldn’t be shivering five months of the year.

"You don't think it's strange, that all your daydreams about the future are about me making it big, not about you?"

That hadn't occurred to Bucky before. Was it strange? "Not really. We're a package deal, ain't we? You do well for yourself, I'll get a rung or two up the ladder as well."

"Sure, but don't you have your own dreams? Stuff you want to do? Everyone else'd be telling you that you've got it all backwards." Steve's frowning, looking almost angry, and Bucky’s regretting opening his mouth now. He hadn’t want to hurt Steve.

"Backwards how?"

"Well, look at us. You'd have to be pretty desperate to put good odds on me making my next birthday most days, never mind on me being an artist or nonsense like that. And you - well, you're different, you know."

Steve shoulders are hunched over now, and he's glaring hard at his sketchbook as though it's offended him. It doesn't seem like he actually wants to be having this conversation, but Bucky knows that neither of them is going to back down from it now. He certainly isn't, not after he heard Steve say something like that, something so ridiculous that he doesn't even know how to start disagreeing.

Except - except he can see Steve's point, if he ignores everything he knows about the two of them and pretends he's some stranger, reading a story about their lives or something. It's true that Steve is sick a lot, and he's heard people in the neighbourhood whispering about that _poor Rogers boy,_ about how Sarah had been a saint, working so hard for a kid who would never bring in much, would he, how could a boy like that amount to anything? Such a poor, weak thing, so _good_ of that charming Barnes boy to hang around him when he could do so much better - and - and Bucky wants to scream in their faces, knows that if he tried for a thousand years he could never find enough words to tell them how wrong they are, how Steve is worth a million of Bucky and they're blind if they can't see that.

Steve is special, and Bucky's got a lot wrong in his short life but he knows, down in some core part of himself that no-one's ever going to touch or break, he's not wrong about that.

He's been silent too long, and both of them know it. But how does he even begin to explain something like this, without revealing too much of himself?

He isn't sure, but he'll never forgive himself if he doesn't even try.

He's hesitant, at first, not knowing what he's going to say until he's opened his mouth and found the words waiting. "Steve, _you're_ the one who's different. And I mean that in the best way. You - you can't see yourself like I can. You're small, but I've seen you take on guys three times your size and come up swinging. And it ain't hard to knock you over, but I've not met a thing that'll make you stay down. You get sick all the time, but you always pretend you're not hurting much 'cause you don't want people to worry.”

He pauses, then carries on, speaking more softly now that he can see his words are having some kind of an effect. "And, Stevie, you're an artist. We see so much ugly shit here, you know we do, and you don't even get to see the colours in it 'cause God's got a bad sense of humour, but you keep going, you know? I reckon anyone else in your place wouldn't be able to take their eyes off the mud and crap you gotta walk through, and you look _up,_ Stevie, you look up and you see the - I don’t know, the _beauty_ in the world, and no beatdowns or whooping cough or idiot neighbours have ever stopped you doing something you want. And - and that's why you're different. You're the best person I know."

Bucky's heart is beating faster than he's ever felt it in his life, and he knows his cheeks are flushed red - maybe Steve can't see that, though, if Bucky's all gray to him - but Steve's eyes are shining and he looks all sort of lit up from the inside, like one of the angels in the paintings at St Cecilia's. And Steve can only see Bucky in grayscale, he knows that, but he can see every colour in creation reflected in Steve's eyes right then, and he doesn't regret a single word.

"What I want, huh?" Steve's voice is so quiet that Bucky leans in closer for fear of missing anything. And then Steve leans in as well, and when he speaks again his breath moves over Bucky's lips. "And if this is what I want?"

There's been enough words spoken between them today. Bucky moves closer still, and so does Steve, and he gives Steve his answer in the first soft touch of their lips.

* * *

Between them, they manage to get Steve into a few classes at the Auburndale Art School, and Bucky doesn’t think he’s ever been prouder in his life. It’s almost perfect; except that Steve gets told what to paint now, and he comes home with stories about presenting the class with what he’d thought was a flawless reproduction of the still life they’d been drawing, and then finding out that he’s painted the oranges blue and the grapes bright yellow.

They’ve beaten a lot worse than some snooty art teacher though, and there’s no way this is going to get them down. Bucky carefully marks Steve’s paints with their own little code to show which is which, and he quizzes Steve on the colours of everyday objects for an hour before the next class starts. 

Steve says that he’s fine, he can figure it out on his own, he doesn’t need help for something he’s better at than Bucky. And they know that it’s a point of pride for both of them, Steve’s art, and part of the reason is that it’s something Steve can do that Bucky can’t - not that he hasn’t tried, doodling stick figures and square houses into the margins of exercise books, but it’s just not his talent - but that doesn’t mean that Bucky wants it to turn into a whole separate part of Steve’s life.

He explains it in that way, instead of suggesting again that Steve needs help, and after that the routine works much better. Bucky knows Steve can actually tell the difference between some colours, especially the very dark or very light ones. But that isn’t going to cut it at a real art school, and there's no way Bucky will let a little thing like that stop Steve’s dreams from coming true. Well, Bucky’s dreams, but whatever. Package deal, like he’d said.

Time goes by as usual. Steve gets sick, worse than he has been in years, and they can’t afford art classes anymore because Bucky’s already working overtime just to pay for the medicine they need. And even when Steve gets better, he says he doesn’t want to go back just yet. He claims he’s learned enough to be getting on with, and Bucky admits that his drawings and the few paintings he’s brought home are better than ever.

Things really start looking up in the summer of 1939. Steve’s always at his best in summer; New York in the springtime is beautiful, but something in the air makes Steve’s asthma act up, and fall is when the wind starts to bite at Steve’s lungs. Winter, of course, is hell for both of them, and in the coldest months Bucky measures time by each breath Steve draws in rather than in seconds or minutes.

But summer is warm and dry this year; and maybe the air doesn’t smell great but they’re New Yorkers, they’ve smelt worse. If they have a few hours free they go and lie in the middle of the park, pretending they’re out in some field in the middle of nowhere. Secretly, Bucky loves that his city is only a few minutes walk away from their patch of grass, and he’s pretty sure Steve feels the same way, but they still toss around ideas for road trips and holidays as though they’re real possibilities. The Grand Canyon is one of the only sights they both agree on; neither of them can imagine it but they spend long summer evenings trying - _is it bigger than their street? Than Prospect Park? Than Manhattan?_

Steve gets a job he actually likes for the first time in his life. He’s helping to design leaflets for a big advertising firm in the city; it’s repetitive but he gets to draw all day and he’s good at it, creative while staying methodical. The pay’s pretty good as well, and between him and Bucky they’ve made enough to put a bit away for savings.

Bucky hates that he always feels on edge in the good times, always waiting for something to bring them down again. He tries to make himself ignore the feeling; he tells himself that as long as Steve’s happy there’s no point worrying about the future, but there’s a constant little voice inside his head that takes delight in listing everything that could possibly go wrong for them.

They go and see The Wizard of Oz at the Vogue Theatre for Christmas that year. Steve has barely stopped talking about the war in Europe for the past three months, and Bucky’s desperate for a way to distract them both. He doesn’t think that America will get involved, not really, but Steve is convinced otherwise and his fervour and sudden patriotism is starting to have an effect on Bucky. And not the effect Steve would want. He feels sick at the idea of fighting, and deep down he knows that Steve can train all he wants, but there’s no way he’d be able to follow Bucky into any war.

So he scrapes together a few spare coins - without touching their savings, because he knows Steve would be mad at him for that - and buys them tickets as an early Christmas present. He’s heard that the Vogue have hearing aids that they lend out for a few cents a show, and Steve might be a bit shortsighted but they can just sit near the front and they should be able to enjoy it just as much as the rest of the audience.

It’s amazing. It’s the closest thing to magic he can imagine. And then Dorothy steps out into a new world, and the screen lights up in colour, and the entire audience - save one person - lets out an awed breath, united in their wonder.

Bucky swallows, knowing that Steve hasn’t understood why everyone was gasping around them. He leans over to whisper _it’s all in colour now is all, it’s some new trick,_ and Steve nods and smiles and looks every bit like he’s still loving the movie, but something small and twisted in Bucky refuses to believe that he can be enjoying it as much as everyone else, and when Dorothy meets her companions Bucky hates them because he can see himself in every single one.

The next Christmas Steve is too sick to get out of bed, and Bucky spends the winter working every hour he can to keep the heating on and for Steve’s food and medicine, every spare thought turning to the too-thin figure breathing shallowly in their bed back home - _God, please let him still be breathing,_ is Bucky’s mantra as he lifts and heaves and finds a spare corner of his mind to throw a few jokes around with the men he works with.

And the Christmas after that is shadowed by the spectre of Pearl Harbor, and the knowledge that Bucky was wrong, two years ago. The United States of America are part of this now, this war that has followed the war to end all wars.

And so is Bucky. Against his will, not that he tells Steve that. He buys new paints for Christmas, and carefully inks their little codes next to every colour. He fills a composition notebook with as many things as he can think of in alphabetical order, with the exact shade of their colour listed next to them - _Campbell’s tomato soup can, bright red and white; candy cane, white with red stripes_ \- and wraps it up with the paints, wishing that he could somehow give Steve the real thing. 

Steve cries when he opens it, though he says it’s just his eyes watering from the cold. They spend the afternoon making love, slow as they can bear to, clinging onto each other and whispering unheard murmurs against each other’s lips, both pretending that they’re saying anything but goodbye.

Some part of Bucky has a feeling that this will be their last Christmas in Brooklyn, and he needs it to count. He needs the memory to keep him going, through the long days that he knows lie ahead. Steve romanticises the war, and Bucky doesn’t want to be the one to tell him that it’s probably nothing like the glorious, gallant thing he’s built it up in his head to be. War is the reason Steve doesn’t have a father, after all, and it’s where he’s going to have to picture Bucky in a few short weeks. He isn’t leaving Steve much to keep him going; Bucky figures he can at least let him have his dreams.

* * *

Months later, caked in mud and every muscle in his arms screaming at him after holding his gun steady for three days straight, he pictures the old movie theatre and watching Dorothy on her quest to get back to Kansas, and he remembers thinking at the time: _lady, you have such a good thing going in your new world, why not just stay?_ And he knows every one of the soldiers around him would kill to be back in their homes right then - hell, that’s half of what they _are_ killing for, isn’t it? - but he thinks that even if he was in some wonderland of beauty and magic and all the joy in the world, he’d still just want his home. 

He’s met hundreds of soldiers, but there are a few that stand out, and they start getting themselves sent out together on special missions. Bucky doesn’t mind; anything that keeps him out of the trenches is a good thing, and he likes the idea that if - when - he dies, it’ll at least be while he’s doing something useful, not just being blown to pieces as collateral, the way he’s seen so many good men go down.

He knows that people think he’s got a girl at home, and he should correct them but he kind of likes the solidarity, swapping stories and pining away with the other guys who left someone behind. He doesn’t share many details, of course, but just knowing that - if you take away the small detail of his Stevie being, well, not a girl - their love ain’t all that different from everyone else’s, well, it keeps him going on some of the darkest nights.

And then an op goes about as badly wrong as it can do without them all being blown up, and they’re captured by a fringe Nazi group - and if there’s anyone worse than the Nazis, Bucky could have gone his whole life without knowing about them. He’s thrown into lock-up with too many men to count, and he has a sinking feeling that none of them will be seeing daylight again.

He already knows Dugan, though he still hasn’t managed to get the story of where his Dum Dum nickname came from out of him. He ends up working on the weapons line next to a man from one of the coloured units, Gabe Jones, who is hesitant to talk to him until Bucky breaks the ice by telling him the story of how a tiny Steve Rogers had stood up to their fourth grade teacher, who had told them to stay far away from any black folks, by saying _well, I’m colourblind, ain’t I, so how’m I supposed to know? Guess I’ll just talk to everyone, ‘cause they’re people same as us._

Gabe laughs a little at that, though his eyes stay sad. But Bucky’s got plenty of stories about Steve to share, and if anyone notices any crossover between them and his ramblings about his girl back home, they’re either kind enough not to mention it or too disgusted at the thought to confront him. He thinks maybe Gabe, at least, with his lifetime of having people hate and fear him for something he was born with, knows the truth, and something in him feels glad that if this is the place where his sorry life finally flickers out, at least one person will know that he died loving the best man he’s ever known.

Through Gabe he meets Jim Morita, and although their only connection at first - other than the prisoner of war thing, anyway - is that they’re both named James but don’t go by that, they get along pretty well. Jim’s worse off than Gabe in some ways; black folks are looked down on as a matter of course all across America and Europe, but there’s a real specific hatred that’s been brewing for the Japs over the past few years, and Bucky can’t imagine the courage it takes for Jim to keep fighting alongside men who half the time act like they’d be happier putting a bullet through his head than sharing a smoke with him.

Steve would have known what to say, how to keep everyone on their feet and working together. But Bucky can’t stand the thought of Steve being here, in this hellhole where there’s probably nothing waiting for them but torture and death, so he just tries his best to echo what he thinks Steve might do - without provoking any of the guards, which is difficult - and spares a moment every night to send a quick prayer up to anyone that might be listening.

They’ve been trying to ignore the disappearance of the odd man or two from the holding cells. Bucky’s heard that interrogations usually take place within earshot of the other prisoners, to break down morale - which would be pretty damn effective, he guesses - but they’ve never heard so much as a whimper from a single one of those men once they’re out of sight.

Maybe the bastards that have them are trying the whole _fear of the unknown_ element of capture. It’s working, as well; there’s a sick part of Bucky that needs to know what’s going on. Sure, they’ve been pistol whipped into doing some work on the factory lines, but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something more happening, that the factory is just a cover for something darker.

And then they come for him, and he meets the eyes of his fellow soldiers - friends, now, he thinks he can call them - for what he knows will be the last time. His mind is oddly blank as they march him to another part of the building and strap him down onto an operating table. A small part of it is focused on the usual drill, repeating his name, rank and serial number over and over on autopilot. But most of it, as always, is thinking about Steve. 

It’s been a long time since they saw each other. It’s given Bucky comfort throughout these endless months, replaying every memory that’s clear in his head of their time together. He wonders if Steve has made it through that paint set yet, knows in his heart that Steve probably never touched it, waiting for the day Bucky would walk back through the door and fall into his arms, _god I missed you, my love._

No matter what Steve’s doing, whether it’s sorting stock at the grocery store, illustrating leaflets for the war effort, picking fights with every bully in Brooklyn, he’s not here, and as the first needle bites into Bucky’s veins and he can’t do anything but scream as fire rushes through his body, he holds Steve’s face in his mind, safe and _alive,_ and lets the pain take him.

* * *

He doesn’t fully come back to himself until well after they’ve left the building and are marching through the woods. Slow-paced and half broken, with too many men left behind, but _free._ Even when he’s conscious enough to talk in full sentences, he thinks that maybe there’s still some part of him that stayed back there, because he should be happy right now, he’s not being tortured or experimented on and somehow - though he can’t quite believe it, not yet - _Steve_ was the one to rescue him, like something out of a damn fairytale, but he still feels like a core piece of him got lost along the way.

He pretends to be angry at Steve for doing something so reckless, but inside he’s too tired for real anger, so instead he gets Steve to explain how the serum worked - what little he knows, that is - and what exactly it did to him.

“I had a real Dorothy moment, you know? I can see colours now, and there’s just so much more of everything than I imagined.” Steve sounds an odd mix of unsure and proud, and Bucky doesn’t know how he’s supposed to answer. Steve is probably looking for forgiveness, some assurance that he did the right thing - as if he could ever do anything else - but the idea of going to Bucky for absolution of any kind is laughable.

The thought of Steve not being colourblind anymore hurts Bucky and he can’t work out why. He’s wanted Steve to have his colours for what feels like their entire lives. Is he really so selfish that he still wants Steve to be dependent on him for something?

No, it isn’t that, or at least not only that. He just hadn’t been expecting it. He knows that technically Steve’s eyesight was a physical problem, so it makes sense that the serum would have fixed it, of course it does. It’s just - he never thought of it that way, like a medical thing, or like something broken; he always just felt like Steve had a different way of looking at the world than everyone else did.

The same way he always saw something more when he looked at Bucky.

He can’t bring himself to ask Steve the question burning inside him: 

_What else did they fix?_

* * *

Together, they patch together their own team from various regiments; Dugan joins them without hesitation, and Gabe and Morita follow as soon as Steve has thrown his weight around just enough for Colonel Phillips to wash his hands of the idea of the first desegregated unit in the US army. Gabe introduces them to Jacques Dernier, a reckless fighter but an excellent tactician, who understands English just fine but refuses to answer in anything but his native French. Bucky is pretty sure that’s the real reason Steve takes a shine to Dernier; they both recognise the same kind of stubborn asshole nature in each other.

James Falsworth is the last member to join their rag-tag bunch, but since he introduces himself as Monty they still don’t really have a James. Bucky had been impressed by him when they were held prisoner together; he was pretty sure that Monty’s tales of English boarding schools and endless supply of dirty jokes - made doubly hilarious by his upper-class accent - had been a major part of keeping morale up, and although he never spoke much to the guy he agrees without reservation when Dugan suggests him as a candidate. And, of course, Steve goes along with whatever Bucky thinks is best.

Their dynamic is thrown off at first by the fact that Bucky technically outranks Steve in terms of battlefield experience, but after the first operation the newly-named Howling Commandos - Steve goes bright red whenever anyone asks him where the name came from, so the rest of the boys naturally bring it up at every possible moment - are tasked with goes smoothly, things slot into place with an ease that doesn’t quite undo the tight knot inside Bucky’s chest, but that goes a long way towards loosening it.

They’ve always worked well together, and it should be no surprise that when Steve’s body can finally keep up with the harebrained schemes he’s been wanting to throw himself into since they were kids, they come up with strategies and maneuvers that make the rest of the Commandos widen their eyes in simultaneous admiration and apprehension.

As Falsworth puts it: _if every soldier was a combination of Barnes and Rogers, we would have won the war through sheer bloody-mindedness and been back home for sodding Christmas._

Bucky thinks he should be proud of what they’re doing. Some of the missions they pull off are ones that had been written off as either impossible or too dangerous to risk, but somehow they all make it back every time, even if it’s by the skin of their teeth. And Steve is a huge part of that, with his absurd new strength and endurance that almost matches his determination to win every fight he stumbles upon, but Bucky is no slouch. While Steve does the flashy stuff, drawing enemy fire in his ridiculous costume so that Dernier and Falsworth can sneak in and plant their bombs, Bucky is a shadow behind him, scanning every corner and picking off threats one by one by one. 

It scares him, how _good_ he is now at killing people, and it’s one of a growing list of things he can’t bring himself to talk to Steve about. They’ve still not quite made it back to their old level of comfort with one another, especially not when it comes to physical intimacy - though that could just be because they live in a war zone surrounded by men who they trust with their lives but not necessarily their hearts, not yet - and Bucky knows, deep down, that there’s nothing he could do that Steve wouldn’t forgive him for, but in some ways he thinks that might be worse than if Steve turned away from him.

Holding so much power over one person, even when he knows it’s reciprocated, isn’t something he knows how to deal with.

He has a bad feeling the night before their mission to intercept the train Zola is on. It isn’t unusual for him to feel that way; he knows that the shit they pull on a weekly basis should have caught up to them several missions ago, and at some point one of the team is going to get badly hurt. A hateful part of him thinks _so long as it isn’t Steve, I can keep going,_ but he knows that by this point he would miss any one of the Commandos as if they were his own flesh and blood.

It’s him, Steve, and Gabe that are going to actually be on the train. He’s glad it will be Gabe there with them, the only one of the men that he’s certain knows about him and Steve. 

They’ve not had enough time yet to come to terms with these versions of themselves: Steve’s new body and Bucky’s changed mind. There’s a hint of tension that wasn’t there when they were younger, and in their stolen moments away from the others when they cling tight to each other and share broken sentiments they could never say above a whisper - _missed you so much, want to touch you, want you, us, I need this_ \- Bucky swallows down the truths he’s had a lifetime of practice burying and just holds Steve closer, hoping with everything in him that it’s enough.

* * *

He barely has time to think in the desperate moments when he’s clinging onto the train, and as he falls the only coherent thought left inside him is _I never told you how much I love you._

He doesn’t feel pain as he hits the ground, only a very distant fear - that impact should have killed anyone; even Steve might not have walked away from a fall like that. He has time for a panicked wish that he’ll die quickly, not long and drawn out while everyone - Steve - is already mourning him, and then the darkness takes him.

* * *

There is very little colour, where he’s taken. The only brightness comes from his own body, where he’s split apart and cut into, spilling vivid warmth across the grey concrete.

They don’t understand why their methods to make him forget aren’t working, even after several months. His family take a long, long time to vanish. Becca is the last; her quick smile and dancing feet linger in his mind long after he feels a connection to them.

The Commandos go slowly but surely; he remembers how to aim a gun while running for his life without any knowledge of the men who taught him.

It takes them only a few days to break him of the memory of Captain America.

They don’t understand. The comic books talk about a great friendship between this new American superhero and his childhood friend, the unremarkable Bucky Barnes who’s captured the hearts of children across the States and Europe both.

He hears them talking amongst themselves; a mixture of German and Russian but with enough English thrown in for him to make out the general idea.

He doesn’t care enough anymore to wonder what they mean when they say everything should be gone by now.

It’s a low-grade technician that realises what they’ve been doing wrong.

They erase the last trace of Steve Rogers on a bleak, colourless day in late November.

And the Winter Soldier is born.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line "He knows that people think he’s got a girl at home, and he should correct them but he kind of likes the solidarity" is a reference to the plot of my fic [You can't bury the sun,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7739776/chapters/17643220) in case you want more Howling Commandos than are in this story.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the first half, feedback is very very welcome!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have finally been given inspiration to start writing this again! And the third and final chapter is underway as well. 
> 
> This chapter deals with something I've wanted to explore for a while, which is what Bucky was doing in-between Winter Soldier and Civil War. It was actually really tricky to write from his POV here, I'll probably go into more detail in another fic one day, but for now I hope you like this.

* * *

Time is not a concept he can fully understand, not anymore.

There are constants in the Soldier’s life, constants he holds onto without knowing why.

When they put him into the cryogenic chamber and start preparing him to go under once again, the pressure on his eyelids always causes a dancing pattern of colours and shapes behind them.

He focuses on that every time, instead of on what exactly they’re doing to him. Sometimes he remembers why he’s inside the chamber. Sometimes he doesn’t.

He doesn't know which is more painful.

Bluegreenyellowpurple is a much better refrain to have looping through your head than needleagonyhurts _why._

Decades go by as though they were heartbeats.

Hours pass as slow as years, especially on the days they feel like experimenting on him. 

Faces ages as his stays frozen. Technicians and handlers move in front of him, skirting the area where his chair is kept - maybe consciously avoiding him, maybe not.

Missions are the only break in the monotony that his life has become. He is reborn after every mission, into a new - and yet identical - world of pain and cold and death. Or - not reborn.

Remade.

And then - 

Then -

Everything is going wrong, and he doesn’t know why, or what he was supposed to do to prevent it, but he’s punished anyway. Of course he is. He hadn’t expected anything else.

They prepare him to be wiped again, and when he close his eyes he doesn't see colours. He sees a face, gut-wrenchingly unfamiliar in a way that tells him he should know it.

“The man on the bridge,” he tries, knowing that asking will do more harm than good, but unable to stop himself.

_I knew him._

It’s true. He knows it is, somewhere in some part of him that had stayed buried enough to remain untouched. _What else is hidden inside me?_ he wonders, and then a moment later forgets the thought.

After they fight again, he pulls the man from the river, not knowing why, knowing only that he has to.

And then he runs.

He goes north; some instinct that he doesn’t want to examine too closely is driving him away from New York, and he crosses the border into Canada a few weeks later. Not the official one, of course. No, he ducks through forests and curves around lakes - doesn’t want to go through them, even though he thinks he has the muscle memory for swimming - and eventually he’s there, in a country that he doesn’t know if he’s ever seen before.

Details have been coming back to him, slowly. Not facts, or true memories. Just fragments of them, little shards of shattered pictures that must have embedded themselves too deep in his consciousness to be fully erased.

The shape of a blood splatter against a painting. Chest shots were easier, more reliable, but he’s been ordered to go for the head. Sending a message, he thinks, and doesn’t know why he thinks it. 

He doesn’t remember what the target’s face had looked like before he put a bullet through it. Only the pattern the blood made against the forest, staining the gentle greens with -

He sometimes used to try to remember, when he was ordered into the chair - because he didn’t have to be forced, not all the time; sometimes they could just tell him to sit and he’d obey, like a fucking goddammed _dog_ \- used to try to hold onto any scrap of knowledge, knowing how futile it was, not able to stop himself from trying anyway.

It wasn’t every time. Sometimes he would just sit there, not knowing what was coming except for the faintest little shiver deep inside his brain, a sensory memory of pain that no amount of wipes could ever fully erase.

He’d tried to remember the man on the bridge. He knows that now. That must be why he’d pulled him out of the river. He doesn’t understand the processes in-between the thoughts, but he knows there must have been some connection there.

He half-knows a lot of things without any sense of where that knowledge came from. It's frustrating, and thinking about it for too long makes him feel like there's a sharp stabbing pain inside his head, right behind his eyes.

He remembers a museum, and a face - faces - that hurt to look at, and he tries to stop remembering.

It’s as useless as his efforts were on the days when he was trying not to lose the memories in the first place.

His mind is not under his control. Was it ever? It will remember, or it will forget, and he can do nothing but cling on, hoping that some kind of sense will remain after it’s ripped itself apart yet again.

Canada is - very beautiful, he thinks one day, with a startling kind of unreality building inside him at that thought.

Beauty is - was - not relevant. It hasn’t been for a long, long time, he thinks, which is a surprising thought in itself. A long time - that means there must have been a time before, when it _had_ been relevant, only how can he remember something existed without remembering a single thing about it?

There’s a train headed west that passes through, near where he’s bunked down for the night. He watches it go by for a long, long time, a seemingly endless rattle of huge crates stocked with who-knows-what, not a passenger in sight. 

When it’s finally screamed its way into the distance, the night seems eerie in the sudden stillness. Not that it bothers him. He settles back into his rest position, which is just about comfortable enough to allow him to sleep, while still keeping him in readiness for whatever threats might appear.

He follows the train tracks west the next day, for lack of anything better to do. He’s starting to get a gnawing kind of feeling inside him; food was easy to find in the small towns he skirted around on his journey, he could duck into the stockroom of a grocery store under cover of darkness, disabling the alarms without consciously knowing how he was able to, and grab enough to keep him going for a few more days.

Out here, though, the only sign of humans is the track he follows, and while water is everywhere - lakes and rivers and trickling streams, too-cold but at least that keeps him awake - he doesn’t know how to even begin to go about finding food.

This was a bad idea, he thinks, but it’s a detached sort of thought, as though someone else had spoken it inside his head. He doesn’t really care if it was a bad idea or not; it was his, and that means he’s going to follow it through.

The arm feels very heavy, these days. He wonders if there’s some kind of maintenance that needs to be done on it. He has wild visions of taking it off, of leaving it behind in the wilderness, walking away feeling lighter in a thousand different ways.

It’s not a real goal, of course. Even if he wanted to, the wires and metal are basically welded into him at this point. There’s no getting it off without dismantling the entire body - _his_ body, he reminds himself. He’ll just have to live with it. It might be useful, anyway. He doesn't know if Hydra are looking for him, but he has to assume that they are.

He climbs into a tree overlooking the tracks that night, empty and heavy and so, so tired. A vague maybe-memory comes back to him as he lies in the fork of a crooked branch, of a gun in his hands - _M1941 Johnson, souped-up just for him_ \- while he watches and waits for the best moment to strike.

He doesn’t know if it’s real, and he doesn’t care.

He falls asleep to the not-quite-silence of the night; faint rustlings of wind and leaves and wildlife, but nothing that might mean another person is out there.

He wakes to a loud screech that almost sends him falling out of the tree before he registers it as another train, still distant - his hearing extends a long way, after whatever modifications he was put through - but getting steadily closer.

It’s a goods train, again. He finds that odd without knowing why; trains carry people, don’t they?

He finds himself picturing the exact angle it would take for him to jump from the tree and land on one of the crates. A strange sort of pain tries to make itself known inside his head, which he ignores.

That one.

There’s a car coming up with only one box on, while most of them have two; if he landed there he’d be sheltered from the wind.

He calculates, fast as he’d always - or was it always? - been able to work out the exact trajectory a bullet would take, and he jumps.

Lands.

Lies flat. He made it. He locks his left hand around the front edge of the car, and splays his right arm out for balance, but although the train is going fast he doesn’t think there’s much chance of it tilting enough to make him fall off.

Something is trying to break through, in his mind, and he doesn’t know how to do anything but hold on and wait for it to hit him.

The train feels unsteady under him, for a moment, even though he can’t possibly fall off, and he bends the metal of the car slightly with the force of his grip.

It’s the train.

Something about the train is making him remember.

Oh - 

_Oh -_

Fucking _hell,_ he thinks, desperately trying not to lose the thread of his thoughts again. Remembering the person you used to be before you fell off a moving train would be a disorienting enough revelation to have anywhere.

Having it while riding precariously on another train is really, really not a good idea.

But he doesn’t want to jump again.

Fall.

He doesn’t want to fall again.

So he holds on, letting the train and his returning memories take him far away, and when it finally stops in a city he doesn’t even know the name of he slips off, and hides, and tries to figure out what the hell he’s going to do with his life now -

Now that he has one.

* * *

It takes him a long time to make his way to Europe, and longer still before he finds a place he wants to stay in for more than a few days. Bucharest is an interesting city; ancient buildings are mixed in amongst modern steel-glass ones in a way that somehow seems natural, almost beautiful.

He thinks about his own body, about the warped skin that was cut away to make room for shining metal, about the circuits and wires inside him - he doesn’t even know how far they extend into his nervous system; it makes him feel ill whenever he starts thinking about it.

He finds an apartment building that’s clearly been abandoned; it’s out of the centre, and not too far from the river.

He likes the water, but doesn't want to go too close to it, which makes no sense. He’s resigned himself to not knowing why his brain thinks half the things it does; maybe one day he’ll have the energy to start working on that, but right now he’s spending enough time figuring out how to stay alive and off everyone’s radar.

He can see three bridges, from a hiding place he’s found on the roof of the building. They join two halves of the city together, in jagged, uneven stitches that manage to not look out of place. He runs his right hand along the join where metal meets flesh on his body, along the twisted ropes of scars that snake outwards from that point, and he thinks.

He speaks some Romanian, though he’s not sure what use that would have been to Hydra. His Russian comes to him almost more easily than English does, and he has at least a handful of phrases from every Eastern European country, as well as who-knows-how-many more locked away in his head. Korean is a surprise; he finds that one out when he walks too close to a tour group one day and realises he understand at least half of their words. He slips into an alley with his head down, trying not to wonder why Hydra might have wanted their best asset to be able to communicate in that particular language.

He can’t exactly apply for a job, but he’d rather not live indefinitely on what he can steal - easy as that would be, some small voice inside him is telling him that there are other ways to figure his shit out. He knows that he isn’t the only person using this building as shelter, so he decides that watching what they do might help him figure out where the fuck he’s supposed to go from here.

None of the people are a threat to him, not even if they all decided to fight him at once - which is unlikely, he knows that, even when he’s in the hypervigilant state of paranoia that takes hold of him at least once a day. But he still feels an uncomfortable anxiety building inside him when he finally decides to approach a couple of them; he hates not knowing how they’re going to react, but more than that he hates not knowing how _he_ will. What if one of them moves to punch him and the Soldier snaps their neck in the next second?

He has to try, though. He can’t curl up in his freezing, stolen apartment forever, living off scraps and river water. Or - he can. It’s just that he doesn’t want to.

 _Wanting_ isn’t the most familiar concept to him, these days, but he’s starting to get used to it. Starting to accept that if he can’t control what his brain does, he can at least figure out a way to live with it, without being cold or hungry or in pain constantly.

It turns out his Romanian is flavoured with a distinctly Russian accent. Which makes sense, but is also not the most helpful realisation to have in a country which doesn’t - well, which doesn't have the most positive view of Russia.

Still, there’s a kind of solidarity that the homeless community seem to feel bonds them together, beyond things like nationality or skin colour or age. He’s felt that kind of camaraderie before, he realises, and it only takes him a minute to trace back the feeling to the days of the war, when he’d been a part of the Howling Commandos, surrounded by men from so many different walks of life, all united by - he isn’t sure, really, what it had been. He can remember the sense of belonging, but not what had caused it.

It’s a pretty bad life when you’re feeling nostalgic for a war, he guesses, but he can’t bring himself to care too much. He’s away from Hydra, that’s all that matters to him right now.

“What can you do?” one woman asks when he makes some kind of stammering inquiry about jobs he might be able to do under the radar, without any kind of documentation or official identity, and he has to close his mouth and think for more than a few moments.

He can do a lot of things. He’s skilled in ways that the people here could never even imagine; ways that would haunt their every waking and sleeping moment if they were ever to see him in action.

He can kill. Maim. Torture. Interrogate.

“I can - lift,” he says, because it’s about the only thing that comes to mind that wouldn’t horrify her. “Heavy things.”

That seems to be enough, and he manages to begin scraping out a living unloading trucks and moving stock around warehouses. It’s easy work; if anything, he spends more effort on keeping people from noticing just how strong he is than on the actual physical labour.

He’s done this before, he knows that, or something similar at least. Shifting crates down at the Navy yard, helping on construction sites or in factories, swapping dirty jokes with the men standing round him. They all feel like they come from dreams, those particular memories. He’s starting to remember some things more clearly; missions and training and punishments, but the haze that covers the part of his mind where the man he knows he was - before he was the Soldier - lives hasn’t properly lifted. Not yet.

_James Buchanan Barnes._

Whoever the fuck that was.

He knows this life won’t - can’t - last. Somewhere inside him, he knows.

But then days, and weeks, and months go by. He learns how to speak to people without making them too uneasy, and he tries to gather the fragments of his memories back into some kind of coherent picture, fitting dreams and flashbacks into a twisted little puzzle that’s almost beginning to make sense, and he starts to let himself wonder if maybe, just maybe, he might be able to keep living this way.

Which is the moment it all comes crashing down around him. Of course it is. A newspaper, a photo that comes very close to making him doubt his own mind again in a way he hasn’t since he’s been free from Hydra, and everything he’s built for himself, every scrap of his life here that he’s worked for, is over.

He learns a new lesson, then. Knowing that something has to end doesn’t stop it from hurting you when it does.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to [halloweenatasha](http://halloweenatasha.tumblr.com/), because without you this chapter would have been about five sentences long.
> 
> Hope you all enjoy. Definitely more colourblind Steve fics to come!

* * *

Steve grips the controls of the plane tightly as they fly towards Siberia, vaguely hoping that he isn’t bending them beyond repair, but not caring enough to check right now.

He doesn’t know if he’s done the right thing. He’d always known, back in the war. Everything had been black and white then - which was ironic, since it was the war that gave him his colours; there were the Nazis to fight, and then Hydra, and no-one around him would argue against his attempts to stop them, not if they were in their right minds.

But now? This isn’t a war - or is it? - and Steve had been fighting against his once-teammates, back at the airfield. That makes the situation a hell of a lot more unclear.

“They made me forget you,” Bucky says from beside him, quiet enough that even Steve almost doesn’t hear it. “You were - the last.”

The last?

“The last thing they needed to take away,” Bucky clarifies, maybe seeing something of Steve’s uncertainty in his face.

“That’s -” 

Steve clears his throat, not knowing how he’d been going to end that sentence. _Horrific? Heartbreaking? The worst thing I’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life, Christ, Bucky, how could anyone do this to you?_

“Yeah,” Bucky says, grim and still almost silent.

Steve doesn’t know exactly where his confused mix of thoughts are leading him, only that somewhere among them is a shining strand that’s singing out _you were the last to go and the first to return,_ making itself heard over the rushing maelstrom inside his mind, and tears are stinging at his eyes before he’s even figured out a single implication of that.

He - he knows he’s always been important to Bucky, is the thing. He’s never doubted that truth, not even in his darkest moments.

It’s just - Bucky always had people around him, right from the moment Steve met him, family and friends, and all the kids _wanting_ to be his friends, and later a whole parade of girls who Steve’s pretty sure he remembers clearer than Bucky himself does.

Steve had never been like that. Or at least not until he’d been surrounded by people who saw him more as Captain America than Steve Rogers, and he’d rather not count those days.

He’d always known Bucky was his friend. But he’d also always been conscious that Bucky was his _only_ friend. Without Bucky, he had - well.

“You remember the Wizard of Oz?” he asks, not knowing what he’ll do if he gets nothing back but confusion or a blank look.

“Course,” comes the reply, and something inside Steve’s chest unwinds just a little more. It’s a feeling he hasn’t wanted to examine too closely for the past two years; he thinks he first felt it when he woke up with his lungs filled with water but his body on dry land, and he knows it deepened when he’d heard the words _you used to wear newspapers in your shoes._

But there’s a reason hope was buried underneath all the monsters, in the old myth, and Steve tries to keep his buried too, so that the darkness of his other thoughts might keep it protected, somehow, secret and hidden and _safe,_ the way he could never keep Bucky.

Steve swallows, feeling something rise up in his chest that isn’t as far away from fear as he’d like. “You know how, after the serum, when I said I felt like - like Dorothy, waking up in a new world?”

Bucky looks at him then, really looks, and Steve feels _seen_ in a way he hasn’t been in - god, in years to him, and in decades to the rest of the world. He has friends in his new life, of course he does, and even his own kind of family - he loves Sam and Natasha, doesn’t know what he’d do without them, prays every day he’ll never have to find out.

But Bucky has known him through _everything,_ or close enough. He’s the one who sat by Steve’s bedside as the priest read the Last Rites over him, the one who held him for hours after his ma’s body had been taken away, the one who had -

Bucky has known him and, yes, _loved_ him for almost his entire life, and he still can’t believe that they’ve been reunited. It’s a miracle he hadn’t even thought to pray for, which makes it even more incredible.

“I remember that,” Bucky says, sounding almost - guarded, all of a sudden, though Steve isn’t sure why.

He tries to collect his thoughts. “It was like that, all over again, when I woke up here,” he says, not wanting to remember the exact frame of mind he'd been in, back when he'd first woken up. “Only worse, because you weren’t here. No-one was.”

“Steve,” Bucky says, voice weighed down with sorrow, and Steve shakes his head.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I - I won’t lie, it was hard going for a while. But then Nat made me leave my apartment once in a while, for things that weren’t missions, and I started figuring out a new life here.” _A life without you,_ he doesn’t say, knowing that Bucky will have heard the words anyway. “Anyway, yeah. I wondered, sometimes, how Dorothy would feel once she was back in Kansas. Once it was all over, and she just had to live her regular life again. You know?”

“Her regular life didn’t include fighting aliens while wearing a catsuit made out of a flag,” Bucky points out, and Steve laughs.

“Fuck off,” he says, loving that they can tease each other again, that neither of them feels like they have to tiptoe around the broken parts of themselves. They never had done before, and Steve doesn’t want to start now.

“I know what you mean, though,” Bucky says, his voice solemn again. “I still don’t feel right here, most days. Feels like it’s all a dream, I guess.”

“Yeah. I would feel so ungrateful when I was around people like Tony, sometimes,” Steve admits. “He’d be going on about how advanced everything was now, about all the new technology, new medicines, and - it’s all incredible, of course it is. I’m so glad things got better. For some people, at least,” he feels compelled to add, thinking about all the books he’s read on where governments and societies had gone wrong in the twentieth century. “But - I couldn’t help but wish, sometimes, that I was back there. Isn’t that fucked-up? I wished I was back there, in that world where we were always starving, where we thought every winter was going to be my last one.”

He has to take a moment to breathe, then, because he hasn’t been able to talk about this with anyone, not really. Sam knows a little, Nat a little more, but Steve’s never been good at sharing anything he can’t help but see as a weakness.

How could he want to go back to a world where all he saw was gray, after a life lived in colour? He hadn’t even understood his wishing himself; he’d never wanted to put that burden on anyone else.

“I’m probably not the best person to ask about what’s fucked-up or not,” Bucky says, with a wry little smile. “But I’d guess that’s normal? I don’t know. We don’t exactly have much precedent to follow here.”

“That’s true,” Steve says, still feeling like there’s something being left unsaid between them - how much does Bucky’s remember about their old relationship? - just as he notices that they only have a few minutes left before he’ll need to figure out a way to land.

His hands are still clenched too tightly, but his chest feels a little looser. He just hopes that they’ll both get out of whatever the hell is waiting for them unharmed. That’s all he’s ever hoped for, really. Him and Bucky, safe and together.

* * *

It takes months, almost years, before the chaos surrounding the Sokovia Accords truly starts to settle. Steve isn’t able to spend nearly as much of that time as he wants to in Wakanda; instead, he’s spending a lot more of his life than he’d like trying to understand the vagaries of international politics.

But he gets regular updates on Bucky’s condition, and when he learns that the work of the Wakandan doctoral students team assigned to his case has paid off and that Bucky can now hear every one of the trigger words without reverting back into his Soldier headspace, Steve feels like the knot inside his chest has finally unravelled.

A few weeks after that, Steve and Natasha figure out how to make their argument convincing enough - either that or every politician involved in this mess is sick and tired of them by then - and everyone involved in the Berlin fight is cleared of all charges. Well, Bucky’s situation is a little more complicated than that, unsurprisingly, but he can at least legally reenter the US. It’s a start.

So they go back to New York. Not to stay; Steve doesn’t know if he’ll ever be quite ready to live here permanently again. But they go back. It’s early morning, the one time of day when Brooklyn is - not quiet, exactly, never that, but - resting, maybe. Waiting for the new day to begin.

“No place like home,” Bucky says in a wry voice, looking round at the almost-familiar streets that somehow hurt Steve more than if they’d been completely unrecognisable.

“No place like home,” Steve repeats, under his breath, only - their home isn’t just a place, is it? 

Their home is years away, not just miles. Generations have grown and passed on, wars have been fought, blood spilled, movements risen and fallen. The world has turned without them, for all this time. 

Bucky turns to him, and Steve meets his eyes, feeling the wonder that never seems to leave him - Bucky is _here,_ somehow, in a world where by rights they should both be long gone.

No, their home isn’t a place, is it? Maybe it never has been.

And Steve realises the second meaning in that quote, the one he’s kept close to his heart all these years. There’s nowhere that’s quite the same as your home, of course not; that’s the interpretation he’s clung onto, using it as a way to distance himself a little from this new century. He almost didn’t want to feel at home here, not without Bucky; it would have feel too close to betrayal.

But maybe - maybe it has another meaning, one that might ring true even for people like Steve and Bucky, who couldn’t be further away from the world they grew up in, even though they’re standing just a few blocks away from their old neighbourhood.

_No place like home._

Home is something Steve’s thought a lot about in his life, of course it is.

And - it could mean that home is something that can’t be defined so easily, that home is a feeling, or a person, that there truly is no place that can - on its own, at least - be quite like a _home._

Couldn’t it?

“You’re thinking too hard,” Bucky says with that familiar little quirk of his lips, the one that had made near enough every dame in their neighbourhood sigh after him.

Steve had always felt a little flash of panic, whenever he’d seen someone that so clearly wanted Bucky, but he had always tried to remember that they belonged to each other, in a way that no-one else could ever match, surely?

“I just -” 

_I never thought I’d feel at home again_ is what he wants to say, but the words don’t seem to want to be said.

He moves a little closer to Bucky, instead, hoping that his expression is somehow conveying what’s in his heart, and when Bucky’s smile deepens he thinks that maybe it is.

“You never change, Rogers,” Bucky says, fond as always, and as their lips meet for the first time in decades, Steve finally feels like he belongs again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would love feedback on the ending in particular (Steve's thoughts on the double meaning of 'no place like home') because I feel like it might be a case of me knowing what I want to say but not quite making it make sense in writing? Anyway, thank you so much for reading, I'm very happy this one finally got new inspiration.


End file.
